Convenience. It’s a key ingredient to increasing transit use in the city.
The Campbell Park and Ride, slated to open in a couple of years, doesn’t quite check off the convenience box. While it will more than double the amount of parking spaces from the current facilities at Village Tree Landing and St. Albert Centre to 800 stalls, the location is a big question mark. The mayor acknowledged that to the Gazette last week.
“It doesn’t make sense, really, but it is the only piece of land,” Mayor Cathy Heron said of the $30 million Campbell Park and Ride, located just east of St. Albert Trail and south of the Henday. “There is not a single other option in the city’s boundaries.”
As the saying goes, the horse has left the barn and there’s no turning back. The city is now faced with the challenge of making the Campbell Park and Ride work, something that Heron rightly identifies. “We really need to focus on how we’re going to connect that transit park-and-ride for pedestrians and bikers.” What she’s really saying here is that ridership of public transit must be convenient for everyone.
A letter writer to the Gazette recently confirmed that convenience is an issue. The central location at Village Tree means she can walk from her Grandin neighbourhood to catch a bus at 5:25 a.m. to her job in downtown Edmonton. The Campbell location certainly isn’t walkable for the vast majority of St. Albertans. The time it would take, 45 to 90 minutes each way, in all weather conditions, would deter anyone. Our internal bus system, as currently configured, is unlikely the answer either. As anyone who has travelled on St. Albert Transit within the city will tell you, “you can’t get there from here” in any reasonable amount of time. If the Campbell Park and Ride is less convenient, will transit usage suffer even further?
That is the main question the city must grapple with if the new park-and-ride is going to be a mainstay with transit users. The city will undoubtedly have to explore many options, including express shuttle buses delivering riders from key locations throughout the city to the Campbell Park and Ride, and making the scheduled bus service within St. Albert more convenient. As Heron noted, that may mean taking the Campbell Park and Ride out of the equation for local transit users. “It’s hard to imagine why you would need to get on a bus in North Ridge and go all the way across the Henday to get on a bus back to Servus Place.”
If the city is ever going to grow transit ridership it must focus on convenience above all else. Even the most stringent environmentalists value their time above most everything else. If it takes an hour to travel by bus when you can get there in 15 minutes by car, what would you do?
